Embrace Silver’s Volatility All the Way to the Bank

Most precious-metals investors know that silver is more volatile than gold. But do they know just how big that difference really is?

We thought it would be interesting to measure how much greater silver’s daily moves are – both in gains and declines – than gold.

We documented the daily price movements for both metals, and then calculated the difference using absolute values. To interpret the charts below, you need to know that:

Values above zero represent days when silver had a greater percentage move than gold, as depicted in gray.
Values below zero are days when gold moved more than silver, as depicted in orange.
The values don’t tell us the direction of price movements, only how much they differed between each other on any given day.
The darker horizontal lines represent the moving average of the price differences for each metal.

With that in mind, here are the differences in daily price movements between silver and gold, measured in percentage points.